The birth and development of a plurality of western esoteric currents are considered from the perspective of their essential link to certain privileged loci, where a number of intricate traditions, influences and activities has converged and crystallized, for complex historical and cultural motives.
Certain capitals or cities have served – sometimes over a prolonged period of time – as diffusion centers for specific currents or disciplines, such as alchemy or freemasonry, for instance.

Of particular relevance to this perspective is the case of “border-towns”, bearing the stamp of a dual culture or acting as intercultural focus points, and which appear for these reasons to qualify even better as places of emergence for such esoteric currents.

The goal of the II. International Conference of the ESSWE is thus to contribute to the delineation of a “landscape” of western esoteric currents, by sketching a transhistorical map of their places of emergence and of their main centers of diffusion.

12h00-12h30 Renko Geffarth / Markus Meumann (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg): 'Esotericism, Enlightenment, and the City: 18th Century Halle as a Diffusion Center of Esoteric Currents between the Baroque and the Modern Era'

12h00-12h30 Krister Dylan Knapp (Washington University in St. Louis): 'Spatial Esotericism: Demarcating the Geographical, Intellectual and Institutional Axes of Psychical Research from the 1880s to the 1920s'

11h30-12h00 Maria Moritz (Jacobs University, Bremen): 'Between Eastern ‘Sacred Space’ and the Esoteric Capitals of the West: Indian Theosophists as Mediators between India and Euro-America'

12h00-12h30 Judith Weiss (Ben Gurion University, Kreitman Foundation): 'From Venice to Jerusalem and from Jerusalem to Venice: Attraction and Recoil between Jewish and Christian Kabbalists in the First Half of the 16th Century'

12h30-13h00 Franz Winter (Universität Wien): 'The Dawn of India in Paris: Abraham H. Anquetil-Duperron’s Preface to the Translation of the Upanishads in the Framework of Esoteric Currents of his Time'